Lowering Visual Clutter in Large Component Diagrams

Nowadays component applications can easily consist of hundreds or thousands of components and it is thus difficult to understand their structure. Diagram visualisation does not help much because of visual clutter caused by big amount of elements and connections, especially in the case of flat component models. This paper describes a novel approach of removing a large part of connections from the diagram while preserving the information about component interconnections. It uses a separated components area to show the components with big amount of connections. For each component in this area, clustered interfaces are shown instead of all interfaces, with the ability to show details on demand. The main idea of this technique can be used in a similar way to reduce the clutter in node-link graphs. To show the effect of this technique we discuss example lines reductions for several component applications.